The present invention relates to communication systems and integrated circuit (IC) devices. More particularly, the present invention provides a method and circuit for delay adjustment monotonicity in a delay line.
Over the last few decades, the use of communication networks has exploded. In the early days of the Internet, popular applications were limited to emails, bulletin board, and mostly informational and text-based web page surfing, and the amount of data transferred was usually relatively small. Today, Internet and mobile applications demand a huge amount of bandwidth for transferring photo, video, music, and other multimedia files. For example, a social network like Facebook processes more than 500 TB of data daily. With such high demands on data and data transfer, existing data communication systems need to be improved to address these needs.
CMOS technology is commonly used to design communication systems implementing Optical Fiber Links. This technology continues to be scaled down to make circuits and systems run at higher speed, use less power, and occupy smaller chip (die) area. Another critical aspect of communication systems is the interaction of input and output signals between multiple internal components in order to have a functional system. Communication systems with multiple internal devices that face device mismatch problems with signal timing and signal ranges can suffer from serious failures at the system level. Limitations such as these provide significant challenges to the continued improvement of communication systems scaling and performance.
Accordingly, improvements to circuits and techniques for propagation delay adjustments in delay lines are highly desirable.